World War I

In many ways, Man Ray’s L’Etoile de Mer combines themes that seem to be recurring in the literature we’ve read so far. When in the first few scenes the “homme” left the “femme” instead of going to bed with her, I could easily picture Hemingway’s  Jake with Brett and the anxieties of impotence and of conceptions of love and relationships. The fact that most of the film takes place behind a distorted glass that the viewer must look through recalls Woolf’s window in the first section of To the Lighthouse. There is also a cyclical aspect to the film, not only in the recurring appearance of the starfish, but also the way that the characters are repeatedly shown walking down a road (or beach? I’m not exactly clear where they were). At first, we see “une femme” and “un homme” walking together. Significantly, though we can view them we cannot see them in detail. We do not therefore get a sense of their mood, a nuanced reading of the way that they interact with each other, or ways to interpret them that are commonly found in other films or in literature. The second time we see the characters walk down the now familiar lane, the woman walks alone, marking a change from the earlier scene. Finally, towards the end of the film, the woman walks alone, is met by the man, then runs away with “un autre homme.” While the other aspects of the film are certainly important, this recurring, somewhat cyclical but distinctive walk seems to mark significant moments in the story (if we can call it that) of the woman and the two men she is with. The differences in the walks (namely who is present, since that is really all we can see), are what stand out and add movement and progression to the film, but still in a way in which the reader feels the reappearance of the familiar and the sense of an ongoing, cyclical progression.

In Transition 2 (May 1927,“La Réalité” 160), Robert Sage quotes Louis Aragon, who wrote: “Nothing can assure me of reality. Nothing, neither the exactness of logic nor the strength of a sensation, can assure me that I do not base it on the delirium of interpretation.” This statement encapsulates the spirit of surrealism, in which the “tightly bordered territory” of realism (161), and conventional concepts of the nature of reality itself, are questioned. The value of logic, of theories, and of settled definitions of meaning are questioned. Sage applies this questioning to art: “The dreams and thought tangents of an imaginative person organized upon paper or canvas do not vulgarly ‘mean’ anything, yet they are no less real than a brick house” (161). What is left after stripping experiences of reason is, in the surrealist view, the thing itself—the experience itself—as it exists in a pre-rational, subconscious form. The artistic result is an expression of hallucinatory or dream-like images, often including the expression of sexual desire.

These elements are present in Man Ray’s film l’Étoile de Mer (1928), in which images of male sexual desire and frustration (and perhaps impotence) are shot through hazy glass. Image follows image as in a dream, with recognizable objects, such as newspapers, and especially the starfish, placed in unexpected contexts.

If we follow the surrealist view literally, it is futile to seek meaning in such images, and yet the psychoanalysis from which part of the surrealist approach derives spends great effort on the interpretation of dreams. If we place l’Étoile de Mer within a post-war context, perhaps the dream can be connected with the same type of tired despair expressed in Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s “The Young European” (Transition 2, 9-16), in which the horrors of war have left only “murder and coitus” (17) as viable desires. In Ray, in the end, even desire is frustrated and beauty shattered.

Woolf's (I hope I'm using this right) free indirect discourse creates multi layered relationships and tensions between the characters. The style of Woolf's writing utilizes direct dialogue usually presented in quotes such as, "'James will have to write his dissertation one of these days,' he added ironically, flicking his sprig" (34). With indirect discourse provided by the narrator that reveals the interiority of the characters and their deeper anxieties. For example, directly following the above quote, the narrator explains, "Hating his father, James brushed away the tickling spray with which in a manner peculiar to him, compound of severity humour, he teased his youngest son's bare leg" (34). Here we can see through the commentary of the narrator that James has a strong repulsion to his father without him actually having to say so. This seems to make the thoughts of the characters and the narrator indistinguishable at times. I suppose I'm noting this style to at least point out that it places a greater role on the narrator and narrator's commentary on the interiority of each individual more so than Hemingway, as  we noted Hemingway places the importance on dialogue and on what is 'not' said in order to reveal his characters motivations to us.

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay also seem to "think" much more than they "say." Early on, when discussing whether or not they will be able to go to the lighthouse the next day, Mr. Ramsay becomes very irate that his wife says it is "possible" that the weather may change for the better. The narrator provides us with some indirect discourse: "There wasn't the slightest possible chance that they could go to the lighthouse tomorrow, Mr. Ramsay snapped out irascibly. How did he know? she asked. The wind often changed" (35). The narrator then comments in detail on Mr. Ramsay's now aggravated mental state seemingly from 'Mr. Ramsay's' perspective as if at this moment the narrator and Mr. Ramsay are one-in-the-same. The narrator explains, "The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered an shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies" (35). This technique puts the reader in a precarious position of who to "believe" or identify with or sympathize with. Had Mrs. Ramsay actually just "told lies?" Or, is Mr. Ramsay completely overreacting and simply feels insecure because his wife challenged him? I'm not exactly sure of the significance of this style of narration other than I'm initially noting how different it appears from the style of Hemingway. Hopefully, I'll come up with something better by class time.

When I first read To the Lighthouse as an undergrad, I became interested in analyzing and thinking about the novel in terms of its embedded Grimm fairytale, “The Fisherman and His Wife.” Throughout “The Window,” Mrs. Ramsay reads this fairytale to her youngest son, James. The story tells of an impoverished husband and wife who catch a magic flounder that grants them wishes. The greedy wife’s demands become progressively more elaborate, ending with her desire to wield godlike powers. In the end, the hapless fisherman and his demanding wife find themselves back in their original state of squalor, the wife clearly to blame. Why would Woolf choose to enfold such a seemingly misogynistic tale into her narrative?

As a tale that lectures against the dangers of a greedy and insatiable woman, “The Fisherman and His Wife” presents gender identities and caricatures as they are most traditionally realized. Woolf, in her characteristic defiance of such images, takes the demanding wife and unfortunate fisherman figures and superimposes them over characters of the opposite sex in her text. In his constant demand of publicly appropriated praise, Mr. Ramsay bullies his wife and children with his intellectual neediness, thus finding a parallel role with that of the overbearing fisherman’s wife. The role of doting and subservient spouse thus falls on the shoulders of Mrs. Ramsay. As the painter Lily Briscoe recalls angrily after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, “That man...never gave; that man took. She, on the other hand, would be forced to give. Mrs. Ramsay had given. Giving, giving, giving, she had died—had left all this” (170). And if the couple embodies demarcated roles, then it is Lily, in her grasp of artistic power, who becomes the androgynous figure able to evade these gender expectations. Woolf’s surprising use of such a misogynist myth thus acts a revealing framework for other forces at work in the novel.

Woolf includes direct references to the fairytale in four chapters of “The Window.” As children, houseguests, and her husband bustle around her, Mrs. Ramsay sits with her son James in her lap, reading him the Grimm story. Significantly, Lily’s painting, embodying the most important creative act in the book, is of “Mrs. Ramsay reading to James” (Woolf 55). The fairy tale makes gentle intrusions throughout this section, lapping in and out of view like the waves rippling on the beach outside the family’s drawing room window. Musing on Minta and Paul, her children, her dinner party, and her husband, “Mrs. Ramsay wondered, reading and thinking, quite easily, both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody” (59).

This fantasy tune provides ideal ambient noise for Woolf’s critique of gender roles. Just as the hapless fisherman and flounder give and give to Ilsebill in “The Fisherman and His Wife,” the maternal Mrs. Ramsay fills the quiet gaps and inconspicuous spaces in her family’s world, incessantly giving and caring for the figures in her household and circle of friends. Though she takes satisfaction in this role, she also questions her reason for so stupendously fulfilling the demands of domesticity: “For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, ‘O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay…Mrs. Ramsay, of course!’ and need her and send for her and admire her?” (45). Drawing admiration from all, she is the figure who entertains and match-makes unmarried visitors, fusses over the children, and fills each room with a warm, maternal presence to which every character feels inextricably drawn. As Annie mentioned, her beauty and essence are magnetic.

But for all the feminine relish she finds from her role as matriarch, Mrs. Ramsay also realizes, however fleetingly, the price it exacts: “So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent” (41). Like the flounder and the fisherman, Mrs. Ramsay spends her resources on a bottomless well of need. Woolf uses this vocabulary of commodity and exchange throughout the novel. But just as in the Grimm story, constant giving to insatiable mouths incites disaster. Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf writes in brackets, does not hold unlimited resources of self to expend.

An insecure writer and philosopher, Mr. Ramsay embodies the male world burdened by its important, intellectual works, one that sees women as the figures that must provide solace and reassurance. Just as the pushy wife taxes vitality from her environment with her increasingly extravagant wishes, Mr. Ramsay harps on his incessant needs as a man of learning. The Grimm tale finds a revealing echo in Lily’s astute description: “He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs. Ramsay to death…” (28). Throughout “The Window,” this selfish vision of the world informs Mr. Ramsay’s relational interactions. As a figure of authority and dominance, the overbearing, erudite patriarch bullies his family and guests into accepting that the journey to the lighthouse cannot be made on the day when his children, especially James, desire.

As the fisherman’s wife desires the praise merited to those above her (king, pope, emperor, and God), so too the fickle Mr. Ramsay searches for ingratiating words and investments of self from the women in his life. The morning after Mrs. Ramsay dies, he, “stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out” (132), still reaching and grasping for the magical woman who fulfilled his wishes through decades of marriage and the birth of eight children. But he cannot grasp her, and when his doting fisherman and flounder figure dies, Mr. Ramsay looks for another female to fill this role. His eyes fall on the likable Lily Briscoe, Mrs. Ramsay’s character double and the woman nearest within reach. As Mr. Ramsay decides before their journey to the lighthouse in the final section of the novel, “…an enormous need urged him without being conscious what it was, to approach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so great, to give him what he wanted: sympathy” (154). But it is a role Lily knows she cannot fill, and Woolf, through artistry and defiance of gender expectations, safely prevents Lily from becoming a replacement wish-giver in her subverted Grimm fantasy. 

To the Lighthouse emphasizes Mrs. Ramsay’s physical presence and her physical beauty as characters note, with reverence, the power she seems to embody. Many of the male characters in the novel are marked by their intellectual or creative superiority; they enact the traditional role of the distinguished, intellectual, accomplished gentleman. These men are concerned with both intellectual and English identity; Mr. Ramsay, preoccupied with the longevity of his influence, worries, “The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare” (35).  Mr. Ramsay’s intellectual output is also described with military diction—he  envisions himself as a “dying hero” (35) and “the fine figure of a soldier” (36). Despite the grandiosity Mr. Ramsay and other male characters feel towards their accomplishments, they often doubt themselves and fixate on Mrs. Ramsay, and her beauty, for validation and justification of their worth. These important men, themselves embodying the masculine strengths of the English identity, desire encouragement from Mrs. Ramsay, the embodiment of the domestic and feminine values of Englishness. The text, in articulating how the men root their confidence in Mrs. Ramsay and her physicality, suggests that Mrs. Ramsay’s body itself becomes the site of a sort of national maternal hope.

Mr. Ramsay’s anxiety over the long-lasting importance of his work is subdued by his wife’s physical presence or his remembering her physical beauty. Mr. Ramsay creates for himself a dichotomy of man/woman and intellectual/physical, to soothe himself. By doing so, he better understands his place in the nation and feels his importance. As Mr. Ramsay watches his wife reading, Woolf writes, “And he wondered what she was reading and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought. She was astonishingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to him, if that were possible, to increase” (121). Mr. Ramsay values his wife’s physical beauty because focusing on her appearance allows him to reduce her meaning to her body. In focusing on her physical appeal, he can ignore her mind and imagine her as ignorant and simple, which increases her beauty and encourages his own individual sense of self-worth.

In “The Window,” the pre-war section of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay’s body is established as a source of peace, rest, and encouragement. The male and female characters in the text look towards Mrs. Ramsay and feel their anxieties soothed. She possesses some power connected to a domestic and national hope; she is the maternal body appointed to take care of the home, hearth, and nation. Her hospitality, her love, and her beauty nurture the other characters and prepare them for their individual tasks in life. She empowers Paul to propose to Minta (78) thus carrying on the English nation through a new family. In the same way, her presence soothes Mr. Bankes—“the sight of her...had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem...that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued”(47) Woolf writes—thus carrying on the English nation through intellectual victory.

However, despite the power and strength of her physical body—the maternal site of English hope—it can not endure the war, and she dies. Mrs. Ramsay’s death occurs in the war section of the novel and though her death is not explicitly caused by the war, it is thus connected to it. Significantly, the fact of her death is told through her physical absence: “Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty” (128). Lily Briscoe, especially, feels the emotional and physical weight of Mrs. Ramsay’s absence and the war’s figurative conquering of Mrs. Ramsay’s body. As Lily returns to the Ramsay house and tries again to finish her painting, she becomes overwhelmed by the void caused by Mrs. Ramsay’s death. Woolf writes, “For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one body’s feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant” and later: “Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence...that abstract one made of her” (178). Looking at the vacancy of where Mrs. Ramsay previously perched causes an emotional experience that manifests itself physically for Lily as she feels Mrs. Ramsay’s absence so deeply that she thinks of her sadness as an experience, not of mind, but of body.

The trauma and extreme nature of Lily’s loss is connected, in some way, to the greater losses caused by the war and the ruined promises made to an entire generation. For example, Woolf writes, “Somebody had said, [Lily] recalled, that when he had heard of Andrew Ramsay’s death (he was killed in a second by a shell; he would have been a great mathematician) Mr. Carmichael had “lost all interest in life’’’ (194). Elsewhere, Lily connects the physical absence of Mrs. Ramsay to the dashed hopes of Prue’s life (200-201), who, a beautiful woman herself, possessed such promise for marital and maternal greatness. In the similarities between the death of Mrs. Ramsay and the doomed fate of her children, the text suggests that Mrs. Ramsay’s passing means something more than the loss of an individual woman. As Lily notes, she remains hung up on what Mrs. Ramsay signifies, on what she represents; she focuses on Mrs. Ramsay’s “essence” or “that abstract one made of her” (178). Mrs. Ramsay becomes representational, an abstraction of meta meaning: that of loss, of dashed hopes, of the failure of the maternal nation, of the death of some aspect of the English identity in World War I.

Like Hannah, I was struck by how well the toreros worked as a metaphor for WWI soldiers.  The two groups idealistically gain their glory through the same means:  by facing a wild, destructive force--coming so close that it can easily injure or kill you--and coming out unharmed, maintaining poise and grace throughout.  However, if Romero reminds Jake and his friends of the youth that they had lost, then his counterpart Juan Belmonte must be equally revealing.

Belmonte, much Jake and his friends, are past their prime.  Belmonte once held the darling position now occupied by Romero, when he was famous for how perilously close he always came to being killed by the bulls (218).  However, when Belmonte returns to relive his 'glory days', Jake notes that he cannot do this.  Valuing his life, Belmonte picks out smaller, calmer bulls to fight.  Although this precaution likely saves his life, Belmonte and his audience finds that "it did not give him a good feeling.  It was the greatness, but it did not make bull-fighting wonderful to him any more" (220).  Like Jake and company, Belmonte has changed too much to go back to his youthful, more reckless days of struggle and near-death experiences.  Instead, he can only play the part of a warrior and exaggerate the danger he puts himself in.  This, of course, is not effective:  that past is gone, and nothing can be done to recapture them.

In the latter half of The Sun Also Rises, bullfighting has such a prominent place that it invites its consideration as an analogy to everything else in the novel: from the multi-casted love-battle for Brett to the ongoing struggle for life after war. One such point of possible comparison is found in the “us vs. them,” inside-outside theme that runs throughout the story. For example, the knowledge of the intricacies of bullfighting, and the lack of such knowledge, mirrors a similar dichotomy concerning war. Jake and Montoya recognize their exclusive, “secret” knowledge of the corrida (136), drawing a distinction between those who are “aficionados” and those who are not, where even some toreros have the passion of “aficion,” while others either have never had it or have given in to commercialism. Only those with aficion truly know and appreciate the tragic ritual of bullfighting (136). Similarly, certain characters are on the “inside” of understanding the war, including Jake, Bill, and the others who have war experience, while others are on the outside (especially Cohn). These differences substantially define the relationships in the story.  

This concern for the purity, or authenticity, of the corrida is also an ironic mirror of Jake’s other basic concerns—namely, of his desires for faith and consummated love. Jake seeks the ideal performance of the ritual of bullfighting, in which the torero aficionado creates order out of chaos by taunting, and finally conquering death. But he seeks this ritualized perfection in a world that seems to lack order and meaningful fulfillment. He perhaps still hopes for such order when, for example, he continues to try to pray despite frustration, but the order is not found within the action of the novel. Similarly, Jake recognizes Romero’s final kill as nearly ideal (222), but this kill mirrors Jake’s frustrated desire for union with Brett. The kill is described in sexual imagery: as a consummation in which Jake cannot share, a consummation that ends in death.       

~~Having read The Sun Also Rises as an undergrad, I was very excited to read it from a perspective of World War I and its effect on the writing of the time period.  As I read the second half of this novel, I found that there are very pronounced shifts in the structure of the story.  We get three main settings within the story: Paris, where Jake and the other ex-patriots live; the pastoral environment where Jake and Bill fish; and Spain, where they characters go to the fiesta and the bull-fights.  In the final portion of the novel, we are given a very stressful and uncomfortable environment, despite the partying aspect of the fiesta. 
 One of the first indications that the fiesta might be bringing some problematic events is at the very end of the last chapter before the fiesta begins.  Jake and his friends have already arrived at Spain and are waiting for the party to begin.  Jake tells us that “We all felt good and we felt healthy, and I felt quite friendly to Cohn.  You could not be upset about anything on a day like that” (Hemingway 155).  However, there is one final, one sentence paragraph at the end of the chapter: “That was the last day before the fiesta” (155).  Hemingway juxtaposes this short paragraph from the nice, seemingly conclusive paragraph before it.  In the second-to-last paragraph, we get discussions of the weather, the “high white clouds above the mountains,” how it is “fresh and cool on the plateau,” and how everyone is getting along fine.  Then we get the final sentence about the fiesta.  At the fiesta, everyone will be drinking constantly, and all of their natures will be brought out more dramatically because of it.  Brett’s sexual promiscuity will be more pronounced, Cohn will act even more jealous, and Michael will be more confrontational.
 One also notices a sense of foreboding by the specific language that Hemingway uses to describe the crowds of people.  I would argue that they are intentionally calling up the idea of the Great War, which ultimately caused the alcoholism that this “lost generation” is indulging in.  In the first sentence in of Chapter XV, we are told very simply that at noon the next day “the fiesta exploded” and that “[t]here is no other way to describe it” (156).  Furthermore, on page 157, Jake describes how the nice tables are taken and put away by the restaurants (because there will be so many drunken antics by the fiesta-goers), and Jake compares the café to a “battleship stripped for action” (157).  When the first rocket goes off, which announces the start of the fiesta, its smoke “hung in the sky like a shrapnel burst” (157).  Considering Jake’s war wound and the psychological trauma that was caused by it, it is almost as if he is having a “shell-shock” flashback to his time in the war.  At the very least, it calls to mind the very war that put him, his friends, and Brett onto the self-destructive paths that they expose most prominently at the fiesta itself.

Just as Jake Barnes opens The Sun Also Rises talking about Robert Cohn as an oblique way really to focus on himself, so Hemingway, by virtue of omitting many direct references to WWI, makes his narrative rise and set on war. In his comments on the festival of San Fermin, Jake charges his language with war images. As he walks around the city on the opening day, Jake pairs Spanish events with wartime equivalents. The "fiesta exploded" (157); the café was "like a battleship stripped for action" (158); smoke from a rocket announcing the fiesta "hung in the sky like a shrapnel burst"  (158). The fiesta, like the war, persists even in the rain, keeping up "without any pause" and being "only driven under cover" (174). The frantic running en masse to the corrida, the climbing of a ladder to get up into the bull ring (paralleling the up and over motion in the trench)--all these movements mimic the front lines. And as they jam into noisy, packed Spanish cafes, Jake's Parisian party loses itself in the crowd: "The hum went on, and we were in it and a part of it" (166). Hemingway's fiesta is a retooled warfront, and each of the characters must then relive their war experience both individually and collectively.

If the setting of Pamplona acts as a recreated warfront, then it is the toreo and the torero that serve as clear metaphors for the soldier. Montoya is the spiritual secret keeper of bull-fighting, the priest of sorts, and he presents this mystery as something that insiders instinctively "knew about," keeping if from "outsiders,"  men like Robert Cohn, who would find "something lewd about the secret" because they "would not understand" (136). Cohn, always the outsider, of course doesn't "get" the corrida de toros. Unlike the veterans and the VAD, he feels squeamish because of the gore--the only one in the party to react this way--and is "'afraid I may be bored'" (166). The spiritual significance of the toreo is lost on him. Compare Cohn and Brett's reactions. Brett, who the men express concern for before the action in the ring begins, "'didn't feel badly at all'" by even the horses being slaughtered, and in fact, is so mesmerized by the transcendent experience that she "'couldn't take her eyes off them'" (170). Brett reacts so strongly to the grace and artistry of the torero that perhaps her desire for Pedro Romero, a beautiful, unblemished, pure 19-year-old, stems from her memory of an equally young and perfect lover who died years ago when he "kicked off with the dysentery" (46). Replace the word aficionado with war veteran--or war wounded--and the parallels between the bull ring and the battlefield become even clearer.

These complementary spaces (the bull ring and the battlefield) also make room for a discussion of competing masculinities. The conversation comparing bulls to steers offers these characters an indirect way to talk about manhood, brotherhood, and the war. The toros, the very image of muscled masculinity, are the animals capable of breeding. In contrast, the steers are castrated as calves. This lack of testosterone makes steers the tame, unsexed peacekeepers sacrificed for the unity of the herd (can't we see Jake often filling this role?). As a toro, to be alone is to be dangerous. The party from Paris offhandedly toys with the implications of this steer-toro symbiosis and symbolism, Bill going so far as saying, "'Don't you ever detach me from the herd, Mike'" (145). For as much as these people alienate themselves throughout the novel, they also go to extraordinary lengths not to be alone, to be forge makeshift groups and communities as they wander Europe. As with the toros, being alone is dangerous. Only the collectively lived nightmare becomes bearable.

Jake finds a kind of catharsis in it all. As he explains to Brett, the toreo acts as "something more that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors" (171-172). Such a description, one rife with greater meaning and order, stands in direct contrast to the senseless spectacle of his war service "flying on a joke front like the Italian" (38). In the bull ring, there are rules and patterns and scripts for behavior. The crowd knows how the fight will end but feeds off the intoxicating possibility of something going awry, of the bull overcoming its fighter. The men and Brett cannot look away as they watch a colorful, graceful version of combat play out in a controlled environment.

The aftermath of this collective experience models something these characters have been through before. After the performance in the ring ends, Jake describes their shared "disturbed emotional feeling that always comes after a bull-fight, and the feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight" (169). In view of this feeling, called equal parts disturbed and elated, we can't help but make the clear, underlying connection to the disorientating and heady sensation of battle. Paradoxically, wrestling with death often injects soldiers with an incomparable buzz of feeling alive. As the characters watch Pedro Romero, their Spanish soldier, in the ring, they find vestiges of their own brushes with death and life, only recreated and re-imagined. Bull fighting in Spain is the highest form of artistry. Jake and his friends are entranced by "the purity of line through maximum exposure" that Romero creates in the ring (172). In contrast to the unwieldy, nameless machine of trench warfare, there is room in the bull ring for strategy and skill, for artistry and heroism. Unlike the WWI veterans in their moments of combat, Romero is able to dominate his opponent "by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing" (172). Romero grasps what has eluded Barnes' entire war generation. He makes a spectacularly redemptive and creative artistry out of killing and claims for himself individual glory in the process.

All of the characters leave Pamplona changed. Bill, in PTSD language, calls the fiesta experience "'like a wonderful nightmare'" (225). Jake identifies the "things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences" (159). For characters--and a novel--that talk about something by not talking about it, the fiesta of Pamplona and the corrida de toros offer this generation an entire week to "talk" about the war by saying nothing about it at all.

Yesterday, in one of my grumpier moments, I felt a little weary of having to constantly generate meaning in what I do as an academic. I went to a pub with a friend and yelled about it over a pint (not quite unconsciously preparing to be among Jake and company again). On a much smaller scale (and probably a different kind altogether) than people in the wake of something like the war or the loss of an entire cultural meta-narrative, I questioned my own sense of “value” in our work and sensed the weight of its constant incompletion.

Then I went home and read Chapter XIV of The Sun Also Rises. It’s a beautiful chapter, but this paragraph that follows Jake’s lamentation of “fine philosophies” and the constant expenditure wrapped up in the effort to keep existing seems to sum up so much of his experience in the story and of the larger experience of the Lost Generation/twentieth century:

“Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about” (153).

Throughout the novel, Jake alternates between glimpses of “good times,” detached observations, and existential despair. He reads to pass the time. He drinks to pass the conversation. Although his further move into isolation in Book III troubles me (the shift from dialogue to conversation in monologue form is especially striking), this chapter seems like an important turning point that still lingers with Jake later on some level. He reads an old book that “seemed quite new” (152) and knows that reading will help the drunk “feeling…pass.” He falls into painful reverie about Brett and sends her off to hell again, then reflects on the consequences of their thwarted relationship. He reels at the “lot of bilge [he] could think up at night” (153). He thinks about the different effects of different languages. He realizes that “remembering” something would make it “seem as though it had really happened to me” (154); then he “would always have it.” And then he goes to sleep. This idea of personal (re)memories defining true reality seems simultaneously hopeful and hopeless, an idea that all we ever keep are things that are dead in the past—and yet we still get to keep them “always,” and it makes them “seem new.”

The next morning, on the last paragraph of 155, he makes observations about everyone in the party and then describes his trip to church with Brett, how confession “would be in a language she did not know” (155). This paragraph moves me because Jake is outlining the ways that each of them are trying to live in their circumstances; they’re inextricably bound together but still stuck in their own inviolable selves. Before the fiesta, though, there’s a strange peace here: “You could not be upset about anything on a day like that” (156). Not much ever changes, but everything is different after the war. And the only way to live in a world like that is to just keep going each day.